Before proceeding with a particular product, service, strategy, or tactic, it is often desirable to obtain information about the behaviors, opinions, and attitudes of the marketplace. These data will often help predict if potential customers will be interested in acquiring the product or service or how they may react to a given strategy or tactic.
Market research plays an important role in understanding the current and future wants, needs, and behaviors of the marketplace. It is often applied in business-to-business and business-to-consumer applications. As a result, many companies invest a significant amount of money, time, and resources in market research programs.
Typically, if someone (a “client”) requires a better understanding of the market place, they will obtain information using an in-house market research department, an out-of-house third party market research firm, or both.
To obtain the requested information, individuals within research groups typically perform a series of linked steps. For example, these steps may include:    (1) working with the client to define the problem;    (2) designing a research instrument (i.e. a survey);    (3) creating the research instrument (writing/producing the survey);    (4) fielding the instrument using mail, telephone, in-person or Internet-based media;    (5) processing the data obtained and analyzing the results; and    (6) generating a report of findings for the client.
In conducting market research, a critical component of providing high quality, non-biased, and cost-effective results involves the recruitment and assignment of qualified individuals to a relevant research initiative or survey. As used herein, a “qualified” individual is an individual that possesses the necessary characteristics that are required for participation within a particular survey. A respondent is defined as an individual possessing the desire or willingness to participate in an active survey and a “qualified” respondent is a respondent who possesses both the willingness and the necessary characteristics that are required for participation within a particular survey.
The process of recruiting qualified individuals and assigning them to active or upcoming surveys is often complex, time consuming, expensive, and error-prone. This problem has long existed in all areas of market research. However, the ability to efficiently assign a survey to a qualified individual offers tremendous value to all constituencies involved. For example, the ability to efficiently assign a survey to a qualified individual can provide the following benefits:                (i) heightened relevancy for research participants,        (ii) increased overall research quality through higher completion rates driven by respondent relevancy, and        (iii) maximized benefits for the market research company        Conventionally, to acquire the appropriate number of qualified respondents for a research study, over-sampling is often employed. Over-sampling involves contacting a large number of people and searching for those persons who possess the required characteristics or criteria that is required for participation in a particular survey. Those individuals possessing the necessary criteria or characteristics are invited to participate in the survey while those who do not are dismissed. Unfortunately, over-sampling tends to increase the time, resources, and the cost required to complete a research initiative due to large number of “dismissals” that are typically incurred (those who do not possess the required characteristics and are subsequently dismissed). Additionally, over-sampling among a low incidence audience often raises the time or financial requirements to a prohibitive level, thus often forcing many clients to abandon their research initiatives.        
One method of reducing the overhead that is incurred by over-sampling is through the profiling or targeting of qualified respondents. Profiling or targeting can offer an alternative to over-sampling when attempting to acquire feedback from a desired number of qualified respondents. Profiling or targeting involves the use of pre-existing information about a pool of potential qualified respondents. Using this information, individuals are selectively invited to participate in research initiatives. However, while targeting overcomes some of the deficiencies associated with over-sampling, a significant drawback is that the practice of targeting individuals requires both a large amount of initial data collection and a willingness to perform ongoing data collection and management to ensure the accuracy of the collected information over time. Within the market research industry, maintaining current and accurate information is troublesome, expensive, and increasingly subject to privacy issues.
Based on the foregoing, it is clearly desirable to provide a mechanism that can offer an efficient, fast, and cost-effective solution to qualifying individuals and for inviting those qualified individuals to participate in appropriate and relevant surveys.
It is further desirable to provide a mechanism that can increase the value of a company's market research by heightening the relevancy for individuals who share their opinions in market research initiatives, and significantly increasing the quality of the conducted research through improved completion rates.